The Tower of Living and Dying

by Anna Smith Spark

  Moonlight and torchlight in through the shutters. Drunken yells of “The king! The king!”

  The next morning, he woke up feeling refreshed and peaceful, and his leg didn’t hurt quite so much. A weight off his mind.

  He had some idea, then, that he’d been worried about something in the night. Couldn’t for the life of him remember what.

  The goal of all our lives now, he thought. Killing him. I will kill him, he thought. Evil vile poisonous little shit. His life or my life. A knife, or a sword, or an arrow, or poison? Plans already starting forming in his head.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Spring came. The first white flowers pressing up through the dark earth. The snow melting. The world unfurling. Green haze on the trees, the first buds, the first tiny leaves. The air smelled warmer, even in the cold biting north wind. The light changing. The sea and the sky also somehow changed.

  It delighted Marith, to see Thalia see it.

  “I did not know,” she said, her voice filled with wonder. They rode out of Malth Elelane into the woods where they had built themselves a frozen ice bower. Green things pushed up everywhere, putting out blue and yellow flowers. The beech trees were all in bud.

  “Listen.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “A greywing,” Marith said. Sound of pure joy. It hung in the air above them, beating its wings frantically, black against the sun.

  “They are coming back for the summer. From the south, from Maun, to nest on the cliffs.” They were coming early: a good sign. Meant a warm, early spring.

  “All the way from Maun?” said Thalia, astonished. “They fly across the sea?”

  “They’ve come even further than you, beloved.”

  Another greywing came to join the first. A flock of them, swirling in the sky on the horizon, a smudge like smoke.

  So much that needed doing, a kingdom to rule. But ignore it: they rode out alone into the country around Malth Elelane; the beauty of the land opened itself to Thalia like a new language. He saw it in her, the sky with its ever changing clouds, so different from the golden blue dust of Sorlost, the pine groves sweet with resin, the fast white rivers, the cliffs falling dark into the sea. They rode out and she drank in it, filled herself with it. Wonderful to watch. He himself saw it anew, more beautiful even than he remembered it.

  “Shall we go on?” The woods opened into a meadow, sheltered and south facing, almost warm already, carpeted with white and purple clover. The meadow grass grew up as high as the horses’ knees, they rode through it as if they were riding through a shallow sea. There were small brown cattle in the meadow, shaggy coated with long twisting horns. These raised their heads lazily, grass and clover hanging from their mouths, watched them with big liquid dark eyes. They always looked rather sorrowful, cattle, Marith thought.

  “It’s so alive,” said Thalia.

  “Well … yes.”

  “I didn’t realize.”

  But of course, she wouldn’t have realized. She must have thought all of the White Isles was just ice and frost. It astonished him again, her ignorance, the closed nature of her world. She lived her whole life within the walls of a temple in a city in the desert, where there were no seasons, no change. She had seen such things: life; death; the single act of chance, of a lot drawn, that had made the difference between the two. She had been sacred to a god, chosen, hallowed, almost herself a goddess. But she had never seen running water, until he showed her a stream; she had never seen the spring coming until here, now, looking at the trees and the meadow.

  “Ah. Wait. This will please you.” Marith steered the horses through the woodlands upwards, onto the higher slopes of the Tremorn hills. The landscape here became wilder, more like the moorlands of Third Isle that she had seen already, but she gasped still as she saw it, for the gorse had all come into flower. The melting snow had watered the high ground and the earth shone green with grasses and yellow with gorse flowers.

  “And see here.” They dismounted, walked across spring turf that was soft as furs underfoot. Thalia stepped and almost jumped, delighted.

  There were hares on the high hills, and hawks hunting the greywings.

  “Oh,” she whispered. “Oh. Oh.” The yellow gorse flowers made her skin golden. “Thank you,” she said.

  Marith sighed. “We need to go back now.”

  “Already?”

  “I’m afraid so. Things that must be done”

  They passed a way house, riding home again. Marith left an offering of a few coins at the godstone at its entrance. A ruined house, out in the woods, tumbled into shapeless piles of mossy stone. Humps and hollows in the ground beneath a copse of ancient apple trees that Carin had said were the remains of an ancient village.

  “Look!” Thalia said suddenly, pointing. Marith saw a flash of white, in the trees.

  “What was it?”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t see it properly. I think perhaps it was a deer.” Her face changed. “No, not a deer. Just a bird, I think, moving in the trees.”

  She looked suddenly, oddly frightened.

  “There are no wolves on the White Islands,” said Marith. “Nothing to be frightened of. And I have a sword.”

  “It was a bird,” said Thalia. Her hands were shaking, holding the horse’s reins.

  Fear. Fear on him. Something that had made her so afraid.

  “Let us go back,” said Thalia. She made her horse go quickly. “I’m tired,” she said, “I want to get home.”

  Ah gods. Fear. What was it? Marith thought. But he found that he could not ask her what it was that she had seen.

  They rode back quickly. And there were indeed things that must be done.

  The burial of the dead. Finally, with the snow melting, the spring coming, at last now it must be done. The rancid vat of honey, pus stink, oil-thick sweetness around decaying flesh and bones. The bodies on the gatehouse, ragged, crow food. Black meat. White skulls. His mother’s hair still yellow. Ti’s hair. Could have been his own.

  Bury them first, his stepmother, his brother, take them down from the walls where they hung. The rest, Elayne’s family, let them hang there forever, rust stains on old bones nailed to the stonework. Bone charms. Like charms against ill luck. Stay there, until no one remembered what they meant. But his mother—his stepmother—and his brother, they must be buried.

  I will not march off to wonders, Marith thought, with their eyes watching from the walls of my home.

  The bones were taken down at night. Osen supervised the work. Offered to do it.

  “Some things no one should have to do,” Osen said. Osen had buried his own mother, two years past.

  He ordered a Queen’s Mound raised, for Elayne. White white heaped stones. She was buried wrapped in silver cloth, what was left of her, her body garlanded with yellow flowers. Ti was buried next to her, a prince’s grave, a child’s grave. He was a prince and he died. That is what they would say of him. Who lived, now, that could say he had ever claimed to be king? They were buried in the dusk, the evening light falling, the sky was filled with clouds and the dying sun came through them death-wound red. They were buried beside Marith’s own mother Marissa, who had lain for twenty years beneath a cairn of blue stones. The rocks of their grave were carved with flowers and patterns. Rune words: hel, henket, mai, bel. For comfort, for death, for grief, for love.

  The next day, he took Thalia out riding again. They went up the bank of the river Heale, that ran fast and clear down from the hills. Marith took her to the Leaping Stones in the woods where the river fell over rocks in white rapids; there was a pool beneath the rapids where he had swum in summer. It was too cold to swim, of course, but she dangled her feet in the water, giggled at the cold. There were big fish in the river, they saw them in the depths, moving like shadows. Pike, with sharp teeth. A single, very early dragonfly. Thalia had never seen a dragonfly before. It landed, for a single moment, on the sleeve of her silver gown.

  The sun was setting, when they returned to
Malth Elelane.

  Deep, sweet sleep. And then he woke in the dark, sick and frightened, and things were crawling and whispering on his bedchamber walls.

  And then his father’s burial.

  In the dawn Marith went up to the Hill of Altrersys. It was a bare, barren place, grey stones tearing up through the soil of Thealan Vale, black earth. The sea was visible from its height, a thin line of silver, Morr Town and Malth Elelane lay before it, between the hill and the sea. It looked already like a grave and had always been the grave site of kings. The one place on the White Isles where the lich roads did not go.

  At the summit were the grave mounds of Altrersys and Serelethe and Eltheia. Small, low mounds, half covered in soil, weathered, slipping away. Their stone still crusted, if one looked closely, with bronze and gold. The tombs of the Altrersyr clung around them, sliding down the hillside. Hilanis. Fylinn Dragonlord. Tareneth Whole Skin. All of them lay there, the great lords, the legendary kings of the past, Marith’s kin. His grandfather Nevethyn lay there—if you went up there to his grave on the evening of his defeat in Illyr, the folk of Morr Town claimed, you could hear him moaning in pain. “Nonsense,” Marith had said when Ti had asked him about it, terrified, when they were children. “Nonsense.” The maid who had told Ti the story had been whipped. Years later, Marith had suggested to Carin that they go up there to listen, both of them dead drunk. They had got to the foot of the hill and turned back.

  “So now your father will lie there,” said Osen. “And it’s done. So let’s get it done.”

  “I have some hatha,” said Osen. “If you want some. It might actually do you some good, today.”

  Ah, gods. Marith rubbed his eyes. Ah, yes. He said slowly, “No.”

  “Sensible, possibly.”

  “Ask me again when it’s done.”

  “Even more sensible.”

  Lord Stansel led up the horses and the bier. A long column of soldiers marching behind, sarrissmen with their long spears, bronze helmets over their faces; archers with ceremonial bows of horn and sweetwood. The barrel containing his father’s body. Wrapped and wrapped in scarlet cloth, and he could see it, rotting and oozing into the honey it swam in, the grim face still staring out balefully, the shocked open eyes in the darkness, the hands moving, coming up to its chest to ward off the blows of a sword.

  He said to Osen, “I’ll have some hatha, yes. Just a bit.”

  Drifted up the hill behind the cart, his head aching, the land and the sky blurred and blurring together into one. Effort to move his head, lift his legs. The colours of the world were all wrong. Thank you, Osen. Gods, thank you.

  He’d asked Thalia not to come with him. Not to this, or his mother and Ti’s burial. “I don’t want you to see,” he’d begged her. “Please. Please, Thalia, I don’t want you to see it. See me.”

  “I saw you kill them,” she’d said.

  “Please.”

  “Bury her,” Thalia had said. “Bury him. Then it will be over. But yes, I will not come.”

  A great pit had been dug into the side of the Hill of Altrersys. Men lowered the barrel into the pit. It rocked, unstable, one of the men shouted, stifled a curse. Marith’s head was spinning. Ill omened, the man shouting, he thought. He stumbled, Osen had to catch him to stop him falling.

  “Kill the man responsible,” he muttered to Osen. His voice sounded heavy. Slurred. Hard to get the words out.

  Osen’s face swam in his vision, shrugging at him. “You don’t mean that.”

  “I don’t. I … don’t. No. Yes. I—” He closed his eyes. Saw colours flickering. Shapes in the dark in his head. What were we, were we talking about? He swayed. Osen was holding him. We’re burying my father, he thought.

  Osen said, “Marith.”

  A servant led up a horse. Again. Another of his father’s horses. Chestnut. Gilded hooves and gold on its head and forelegs. It whinnied, recognizing Marith, pricked its ears, trotted towards him.

  “Good horse. Good horse.” It came to him dimly that he had to kill it. He drew his sword. It felt so odd in his hand. Too light. Too heavy. Soft, like it was made of something other than metal. Don’t take hatha when you’re fighting, Marith, maybe, he thought.

  The horse whinnied. Marith killed it. Again the stink of blood. The horse screamed as it died. Servants swarmed over it, flayed it, butchered it, its bones and skin were built up into a tent over the grave pit, earth and stones placed over the top.

  It took a long time. The hatha was wearing off horribly. The morning light was too bright. We’re burying my father, Marith thought.

  “Look.” Osen pointed. “Look there. Eagles!”

  Eagles. They came circling up from the mountains to the north. The sky was very light; Marith squinted. The morning sun flashed on their wings.

  “A good omen,” said Lord Stansel. “They should always come, at the death of kings.”

  Marith looked up into the sun to stare at them. Thought of other things flying overhead. The crows and gulls that had gathered wheeled off, shrieking.

  Lord Stansel shouted to the archers: “Loose! Shoot them!” The horn and sweetwood bows were drawn, bronze arrows went flying upwards.

  One of the eagles fell. Spiralling downwards. It crashed down with a scream onto one of the kings’ mounds. Another came down falling to the south of the hill, into the wheat fields between the hill and Morr Town. The surviving eagles screamed and flew off back into the mountains.

  “Two!” Osen said. “Two shot down. A good omen indeed.”

  Marith went up the hill to where the first eagle lay. It was dead. It was dark golden, streaked brown and black, it looked so soft lying on the raw ground dead. Its beak was bone white, splashed with blood. The stones of the grave mound were disturbed, where it had come down.

  “Like the last omen was, you mean?” he said to Osen. “The luck horse? Like that?”

  Osen shook his head. “You’ve buried him and it’s over, it’s turned out fine. Good omens and all. Hail King Illyn, dead and buried with his forefathers. Now let’s go and get you drunk.”

  No man can say of him,

  That he did not fight his share or give it.

  No man can say of him,

  That he did not deserve his renown.

  Marith rubbed his eyes. “You wouldn’t happen to have any more hatha left, would you?”

  That night they poured oil over the cairn, burned it; the flames burned very high and blue. The dead eagles, burning, the dead horse, burning, all piled high on the tomb of the dead king. The soldiers danced around it, beat out the sword dance. Swords crashing, striking, sword blades beating against shields. The ringing music of the bronze. All night, they danced by the fire. Drank and feasted up there on the Hill of Altrersys, the burial ground of the Altrersyr kings.

  “I’m ready now,” Marith said to Osen.

  Osen looked up from his cup. “Ready?”

  “Your sword and your life, you swore to me?”

  “Yes.” Osen’s eyes, dancing. The swords clashed and voices screamed out the paean. The flames on the grave burned up blue, lit Osen’s face.

  “You meant it?”

  “Of course I meant it, Marith.”

  The crash of bronze rang out, louder. There were more than just men dancing by the funeral fire. More than just men shouting and laughing at the flames.

  Marith said, “Good.”

  The ground rang with the stamping of feet like horses charging. Swords clashed. Men were beginning not to dance but to fight.

  Yellow dawn in the east. A new day coming. New things. I buried my father, Marith thought. It’s done. He stumbled to his feet. “Your sword and your life. The captain of my armies. It’s time. Come on, then.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The world. The world is waiting. The Ansikanderakesis Amrakane and his Army: the world awaits them. Wonders and glories and triumphs, heartbreak, joy beyond imagining. All of it, it waits, it calls to him.

  Morr Town’s forges burned night and
day and the air smelled of hot metal, fires flickering working their holy magic of change. The bright blaze of liquid bronze. The ringing of gleaming iron. Swords and helms and sarriss points being made. Men came from the mountains behind Thealan Vale bringing the ore to be smelted; deep in the mountains they mined it, bodies soiled with soot and sweat and earth. Thalia saw in her mind their bodies hacking at the roots of the mountains. Boring into the island’s bones. Holy and apart like the metalsmiths, the mine men, who knew the secrets of rock and metal run through the earth like veins of blood. The smiths took it, shaped it in the furnace, wrought it with their hammers, the ringing of it came night and day. The living metal glowing like fire sprites. Gods who shouted and laughed as the hammer fell. Trees were felled for charcoal, green wood in the flames. Smoke smell. Death smell. Charms of making. The final tempering must be done in the blood of a war horse. A man’s blood, once, Marith said. A growing pile of bronze and iron, gleaming sharp as winter winds, waiting. Each day new soldiers marched in under the gates of the fortress, hearts rejoicing at the lovely sound of the forging, peasant boys and fisher boys with a few days’ stale bread in their packs, eager for killing, bright they waited in the courtyards to be given sword and spear and turned out into the camps built on the wheat fields of Seneth. The soil was trampled by their feet and the feet of horses, the air thick with ash and smoke. The spearmen, the servants, the great lords, the young boys practising to swing a sword … they were so filled with the joy of it, so bursting and eager. Rushing filled with joy like the green things growing up through the wet earth.

  Thalia sat with Marith, helping him draw up his plans. Supplies must be brought in, food for men and horses, they must have tents for the soldiers, camp servants, baggage carts. Great long lists of things. It made him groan.

  “Putting more thought to the logistics?”

  “Something like that. This is making my head ache. Am I allowed to say it was more fun not putting any thought to it?”